Actually, as someone who's been there for a week or so now, I can tell you that you can hardly tell. I haven't run into much nerdiness about anything movie-related. If anything, it comes across more like a bunch of KOTOR fans, plus the occasional (and frankly expected) "OMG IT'S WOW WITH GUNS!!!111eleventeen" trolling.
Actually, I've yet to see anyone who says that logical reasoning flat-out is unimportant. (Except when you apply it to their Bible or Quran, I guess.)
What is the actual objection is that the ways used to measure it, actually measure more whether you trained the application of that exact measuring method, than a more general ability to use logic in the real world or in a real world job. It's, if you will, like I were to measure your mental abilities by your gear-score in WoW. Sure, it can be argued that you need SOME amount of intelligence to know what to get or how to function in a group or even follow directions for what to do at the boss, but at the end of the day, I really just tested how much time you were willing to dump into raiding in WoW.
But otherwise nobody will actually tell you that the ability to do logical reasoning is bad. It's just being measured badly.
As for the Flynn effect, that's the most bogus explanation I've ever heard, no offense. The effect of warfare on the US population since WW2 has been minimal, and even less important in Europe. Starvation is also no longer a major factor. The vast, immense, overwhelming majority of people who would have flunked survival of the fittest in the past, now do pass their genes on just the same. In fact, even the opposite can be better supported: the dumb procreate faster. You can't explain an effect by something that's just NOT THERE. You might as well blame it on Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy (maybe smart kids don't ever sleep with their head under the pillow;)) at that point.
Not really. Or not outside of the bizarro world of Internet marketing.
Actual IQ tests still at least try to measure certain kinds of mental aptitude. While some degree of knowledge are unfortunately inherent in being able to even ask the questions, much less answer them (e.g., someone has to be familiar with rectangular blocks before you can ask them to count blocks in a picture), that was never the focus of actual IQ tests. How much you know about some obscure subject -- be it Star Trek or Victorian novels -- is just not part of the definition of IQ.
However the notion is increasingly MISUSED to basically mean "whatever way we can play on your insecurities and need to reassure yourself, to get a click out of you". This can mean knowledge of trivial things, or even things completely unrelated to intelligence, like optical illusions, deliberately ambiguous pictures, paraeidolia, or whatever.
When you see stuff like "93% of people can't tell whether the ballerina rotates to the left or right" on some "IQ Test" ad (you know the kind I'm talking about), it doesn't really mean that the definition of IQ or of IQ Tests has changed. It just means that some dishonest marketers are aiming exactly for the kind of idiot who'd (A) not realize it's a stupid scam, and (B) is insecure enough to actually want some website to pat him on the head and tell him that he's so smart after all.
It's not really all that different from preying on some people's sexual insecurities to sell them penis enlargement pills.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that IQ is pretty meaningless for anything except taking an IQ test. But still, it at least means that. Memorizing trivia that's fully useless to anyone and for anything else than a trivia contest, is just not the same thing as high IQ.
WTF does that have to do with IQ?
on
2011 Geek IQ Test
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Ookaaay... exactly what does knowing obscure trivia about shows from 50 years ago have to do with IQ? I could see it as a geek score for bragging rights, or a hint if you might want to have a professional look into whether you've got Asperger's, but IQ? Seriously?
That's how for example aspirin became a generic name for acetylsalicylic acid. It had become a synonym for that kind of an analgesic, to the extent where everyone was just saying stuff like "take two aspirins" when they meant "take some acetylsalicylic acid".
You don't lose a trademark just because a term is generic for something ELSE than your product. Microsoft Windows is still a trademark, although "windows" has been a generic term for, you know, a certain kind of hole in a wall since the 12'th century. (The concept of a window itself is of course older, but the first attestation of the English word "window" -- or close enough -- is from the 12'th century.) Apple Inc doesn't lose its trademark just because the word "apple" has been used for a kind of fruit for over a thousand years. And Prince Albert Tobacco doesn't get to be generic just because Prince Albert also is commonly used for a type of piercing.
What I'm getting at is that even IF it were to came to pass that Washington University became synonymous with some sexual practice or position, and people went around saying stuff like "woohoo, I had a Washington University yesterday with two chicks"... so what? As long as that doesn't apply to a college, it doesn't come even close to threatening the actual Washington University's trademark.
HPV is a whole family of nearly two hundred known viruses, affecting various types of cells. HPV can cause warts or lesions just as well in the mouth, or on the skin, or ass, or really wherever the virus can get. Some types (e.g., 6 and 11) can even cause respiratory infections.
And all infections raise your risk of cancer. To actually get cancer you need at least two well aimed mutations, one that takes the brakes off cell division, and one which activates one of the two mechanisms which regenerate telomeres (maximum division counters) on the affected cells. HPV gives you the first one for free, as part of its viral payload AND deactivates two genes that normally try to kill tumor cells. (Cells dividing out of control also replicate the virus more.) So now you're only one mutation away from cancer, which is more vulnerable than it sounds.
So now if you have a compromised piece of skin, it's that much easier for UV to turn it into melanoma. If you have an infection in the mouth, well, smoking just became much more likely to give you mouth cancer. Etc.
So, really, while cervix cancer gets all the attention, HPV is involved in about 25% of the cancers of the mouth and upper throat for example. And since we're talking about vaccinating boys, actually men are at a higher risk of oral HPV infections than women, for whatever reason. And don't even think "hur hur hur, VD in the mouth, Beavis" as simple open mouth kissing is enough to get it too.
Plus there are enough cases where it's transmitted from an infected mother to the baby, whose immune system is pretty much crap at the time. There is no amount of discouraging teen sex that will make it an ok tradeoff to have babies pre-infected with something that will leave them susceptible to cancer.
Really, while cervix cancer is horrible, the focus on it as if it were the only problem is actually unfortunate, because it lets idiot self-righteous moralists to turn it into just an aspect of their delusional war on sex. In reality even if you managed to discourage sex (and good luck with that), your kid can still get throat cancer if he just made out with an infected girl. (Especially if he also takes up smoking, but non-smokers have enough such cases too.)
Keep trying to discourage sex if that floats your boat, but in the meantime if we can vaccinate against a virus that causes over 5% of all cancers, then we really should do it.
While I see your point, that's niche at best. Even most developers are really coding against ONE operating system and really set of libraries, because they're doing server apps. So while making the perfect app that can truly run everywhere might be a nice nerdy goal to have (non-nerds will have more tangible goals like "get laid" or "get paid" or "make it to Friday 5pm so I can spend the weekend at the pub"), in practice they're still getting paid for something that will only have to run on, say, Java 1.6 on an AIX computer on a Power 5 CPU and with exactly the IBM VM that comes with Websphere at that. So, you know, whether it runs exactly the same in Windows 7 or an old copy of XP is really fluff. If it works on the test and production server, then that's that. Need or want for some testing across all possible OS-s? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
And that's not even getting into what end-users do, and let's just say that, yes, it's the apps that are important. It only matters if they can use MS Word to read your doc, or IE to read your site. Even the thought of configuring 5 operating systems to check out your page in 7 different browsers and versions, ranks for the average user up there with being anally raped with a spiked mace. He doesn't want to do that. He just wants to point whichever browser his "Internet" icon launches at your site and do whatever he needs done.
For him even having one OS is more of a nuisance that comes with the territory. Even the thought of trying the same under a different OS ranks up there with trying to walk to work with a different number of feet. Why bother?
So I guess to return to the question in the OP, basically you have Adam Smith's invisible hand flipping you an invisible but humongous middle finger. It's easier and cheaper to let you figure out using VMs and multiple OS's than to make that a standard feature. Because the average John Does ain't paying for it, and ain't wanting any of it.
Yet you can get behind a game with a chubby short man that jumps like Jordan and takes shrooms to gain powers.
I dunno, some of us never really got into Mario, though I can't say I ever got too philosophical about why. It could be the moustache;)
Or an emo group of people who go adventuring to save the world for umpteenth time (not final) that wield weapons bigger than their bodies and beating final enemies that can shit you out for breakfast in one shot (with the power of love).
And, again, some of us don't find stupidly oversized weapons to be a turn on. In fact, some of us have donated a bunch of free time to make more realistically sized weapons for some games. E.g., for my part, stuff like the arming swords or Japanese weapons for Oblivion/Fallout 3/New Vegas. Though I'm probably not the best example, check out Adonnay's weapons for several games for some much better quality weapons.
And a bunch of people download such realistically sized weapons.
Don't get me wrong, though, I have occasionally done oversized stuff for lulz too, but still nowhere near such silly extremes as the Buster Sword or the 2 ft broad "Zanbato" in a certain anime. (Never mind that a historical Zanbato was 1.25 inch broad or so.) Think more like a 4 inch broad Zweihaender instead of 2 inch, for what counts as comically oversized for me. And more importantly it's supposed to be mostly a parody, and named and described appropriately to indicate parody intentions, and usually indicating in the description too that it's not historical and why. I don't see anything like that in the JRPG series you mentioned.
But at any rate, no, some of us don't find gigantic swords awesome, and some of us even spent many many hours modelling meshes to make more accurately sized weapons.
In a few games, yes, they're cosmetic or offer negligible advantages. E.g., the jet pack in COH is fully equivalent to something you can buy in game from level 1 for 10,000 inf (think about the equivalent of 10,000 copper coins in WoW) and will last you longer, so, yeah, not much of an advantage.
In others it can get even more extreme than my analogies.
E.g., I remember a web game based on Battletech where
A) fights were at best limited by tonnage, not by points, and you could even spend on blowing that limit in an invasion,
and
B) with enough RL cash you could actually do crap like bring Level 2 or even Level 3 mechs against the Level 1 mechs everyone else was limited to. And if you're not a guru at Battletech, by "level", I mean basically sorta generation, with each being vastly superior per ton to the previous. At the same tonnage, a L3 will curb-stomp any L1. In the board game they're limited by also being worth more points, but, see above, in this game that was removed.
So, yes, for all practical purposes, you could pay to have the equivalent of a spiked steel gauntlet in a boxing match. In fact, you could even splurge a little extra and pay to have a couple more guys with you punching the opponent. It's not just a loaded analogy, you could literally pay to be as disproportionately more powerful as you wanted, if you had enough disposable cash. Rumour had it that the top guy in that game had blown 20,000$ on being the untouchable superpower he was.
It's not even the only game like that.
E.g., in Runes Of Magic, by buying skill books and leaving your character parked at home to study them over night, you can have vastly more skill points than an equal level character who didn't do that. In WoW terms, think having twice the number of talent points of someone who didn't pay. Yep, the equivalent of that was possible.
And it's a shame, really, because ROM was one of the first MMOs which nailed a good enough substitute for WoW. Long before Rift. If it hadn't been for the blatant RL money aspect of ROM, or if they had made a server where it's all free of that crap and rebalanced to work without dumping hundreds of dollars into making your raiding character epic, I wouldn't have minded giving them $15 a month. Heck, even 20 or 30. I'm not opposed to paying for good quality and casual-gamer-friendly gameplay.
But probably they're making more from fleecing their smaller player base than that, so, oh well...
Reducing any moral problem to just whether making money is right or wrong, is, sad to say, bullshit. In fact if that's the only thing that you see relevant in such a discussion, congrats, you might be a sociopath. You may have a successful career in upper management ahead of you.
While nobody says that making money itself is immoral, certain ways of making them ARE. E.g., if you found out that your mayor or the local judge makes some extra money by taking bribes, well, I don't know about you personally, but most people would file that under "immoral."
But generally we have a long tradition of frowning against basically offering to bend the rules in exchange for money. Whether it's in politics or sports or whatever.
If the Superbowl involved officially letting teams pay for the privilege of punching opposite team members, or to get an extra kick at the opposing goal, most people probably wouldn't bother even watching just to see which team spent more money on unfair advantages. Most would also consider it fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sportsmanship or competition.
Ditto if, dunno, the boxing championships started auctioning the right to have a horseshoe in the glove, or if baseball championships started auctioning the right to use a tennis racquet instead of a bat, or if the Olympics started being ok with steroids as long as you buy them from the organizers. At some point any semblance of "may the best sportsman win" becomes "may the guy with the most disposable cash win", and it becomes just a meaningless competition to be the most financially irresponsible loser.
You'll notice that the above are direct equivalents of most micro-transaction schemes in most games. What once at least had some semblance of reflecting relative skill or effort or even just time invested, is becoming a competition in who's insecure enough to blow $1000 on overpowered equipment to finally feel secure to curb-stomp a newbie half his level. And there is no fundamental difference between paying to be allowed to use racquets instead of bats in baseball, vs paying for the Legendary Sword Of Newbie Slaying +9 to use in PvP, or vs blowing some money on whatever else to top some PvE charts either.
So, no, not many of us will frown at making money, but at the way you make them. And if more and more competitions and achievements become rigged to milk money from whoever wants to pay for unfair advantages, don't be surprised if most people don't exactly take that as a positive development.
In other news, after the accusations of using Top Gun footage to demonstrate the supposed Chinese super-plane, the Xinhua News Agency is rumoured to be already working on excuses for why their submarine newscasts look suspiciously like something from The Hunt For Red October. Several party spokespersons are rumored to be practicing in advance saying "No, it's not like that, captain Wang Hung Lo just happens to look exactly like Sean Connery" with a straight face;)
I dunno... I definitely didn't start in college with programming. In fact, I was already good in several programming languages, including Z80 assembly by the time the muppets in college even tried to teach us the first thing about computers.
But on the whole I still say that I used to find it a lot more fun before it actually became a job. Sure, I could still do it for fun at home, and actually still do, but... somehow it's not the same thing any more. Too often after dealing with yet another moron whose clever optimization is to use Integer instead of int, because, I kid you not, "then the runtime only copies a pointer to it on the stack, not the whole int", or another moron customer who thinks 90% of the work is done after he saw a HTML mockup (after all, that is the hard part, right?), or some moron whose idea of managing or testing is to count pixels with a magnifying glass and woe if a label is rendered differently in his browser than in the Paintshop images in the requirements, or some moron whose idea of performance testing is to time the unit tests and call a meeting if this week it runs slower than the last week (e.g., because extra tests for fixed bugs got included), etc... too often I just want to forget that programming even exists.
My personal advice to any kid who loves programming would be: find a different job to pay the bills, and keep doing programming just for your own fun. That way you'll both keep your fun hobby untainted by such crap, and probably have higher job satisfaction in that job that pays the bills too. And while it may seem like an eternity until you'll be a boring 40-year-old or even 30, trust me, it'll be sooner than you think that you find yourself on the shit end of a bigger age-ism stick than porn actresses do.
Eh, it didn't take that long. It kinda just came naturally as I was typing it, which probably is the saddest part.
That said, as I was saying, I'm answering about software development, not about programming. I still think it captures the actual and more important essence of software development: taking something that at first sounds like great fun and something you like to do (which drawing flowers with chalk is a good guess for little children) and mis-managing it into a soul-sucking nightmare. Using some fun building stuff with blocs as an illustration may be a better example of the programming part, but sadly it would miss the more important soul-sucking parts there.
Actually, some of us are pretty easy about it. Although the Christian God is contradictory enough to be impossible to fully demonstrate, I for one would settle for a much less powerful being as God. Or as a god.
And it's not just me. For 99% of the existence of the human species, we lived just fine with much less omnipotent gods. Even the Jewish God of the OT, actually promised a lot less. Heck, until very late, he didn't even promise an afterlife at all. (In fact, Genesis even spells it out that God _didn't_ want humans to have eternal life.) Other civilizations were perfectly OK with Gods of limited powers, or not immortal (see the Norse Gods), or even already dead (see Osiris.)
I mean, take the traditional supposed powers of a Pharaoh, as an incarnate of Horus. He was supposed to bring fertility and prosperity by just being there, bring Ma'at (justice, orders, etc) to the land, etc. And of course, be the representative of some guys who can give an afterlife.
Let's say some dude came forward and claimed that he is the new incarnate of Horus. How would we go about testing it? Well, for example, let's see if he can influence the fertility of some plots of land, in a double-blind experiment. He gets 100 randomly selected farms he has to boost the production of, 100 he must lower the production of, and 100 more are chosen as control. Repeat that for 2-3 years.
Nobody else knows which farms, until it's time to compare results.
Ma'at? Same deal. Get a list of 100 random cities where the criminality must drop faster than the nation average. Can he pull that stunt?
If he wants to go for even more god points, let's see, Rameses II at Kadesh claimed to have been at some point deserted by all his soldiers and that he personally, with his divine dad Ra as help, repelled the assault of the Hittite chariots at the crucial point of that battle. So it seems to me like there is precedent that the incarnate Horus could use his superhuman powers in battle. Well, we can test that too. We set the guy against a few remote controlled drones or vehicles with belt-fed beanbag ammo, and he must destroy some of them without getting beaned.
If someone can do that, personally I'll cheerfully proclaim him a god. Maybe not THE God, and I may have my doubts about whether it's actually supernatural (as opposed to, you know, it being natural that someone is a god like that;)) but I'll cheerfully grant that guy a minor god status. I might even volunteer to pull rocks for his pyramid, because, hey, it can't hurt to get on a god's good side.
Yep, that's the trick part, way I see it. He asked about software development, not programming. Programming what you want, especially in a game, is fun. Software development, on the other hand has lower average job satisfaction than being a garbage man, according to a survey from a couple of years ago.
Mind you, it might still be able to explain it via an exercise, but I don't think anyone has the heart to do that to some innocent little kids. I mean, it would probably go like this:
"Hi, kids, my name is Moraelin and I'm here to show you how software development goes. I must thank Mrs Crabapple for letting us come to the park for this exercise. We'll be making this a role-playing exercise, so it's easy to understand. I brought a few friends to help with some key roles. Say hi to Tom, Dick, Harry, Jack and Jill.
"Now the first thing to remember is that we're not in this for the fun. You'll get a grade for this, so try to do your best.
"The most important skill in my profession is to sit in meetings and look interested. It may not be the greatest percentage of the day, unless you really draw the short straw, but you'd be surprised how much more important making a good impression to the boss is than actual work...
"You over there? Yes, you in the blue sweater. What's your name? Well, Billy, you get a minus one point on the grade for fidgeting instead of paying attention. Yes, I know it's boring, but that's the whole point I'm trying to convey. Let this be your first lesson in real world employment.
"Well, anyway, for the purpose of this exercise, you'll be divided into teams and have to draw something on the pavement with chalk. As a team. Remember, what matters is the whole result, not just your own personal performance.
"Now to make things more educational, I brought a second class to pad the teams with. The assignments will be big enough to include them, but they've all been assigned some secret roles to play. Most... let's just say it sounds like 'mazy loron', but occasionally you'll get the guy who just tells you how to do your job instead of his own doing his, the guy who keeps adding pointless "THIS IS A FLOWER" comments to your work instead of doing his own part, the guy who keeps trying to tell you about his vacation instead of letting you work, and so on. Some may even be naturally inclined to go beyond even the assigned role in their being useless and counter-productive.
"I probably don't need to tell you that you're not supposed to beat them up even if they 'accidentally' erase your part of the work. In fact, you're not even allowed to complain about them. Doing so will get you a bad grade for being a bad team member.
"You have a question? Oh, WHAT you'll have to draw? I don't know myself either. Tom and Dick will role-play the customer. You'll have to make them tell you what they want drawn.
"Now they'll be as vague and occasionally wrong as humanly possible, and occasionally obnoxious, but you must extract exact information from them. You don't get points by just doing close enough. If they say they want a flower, you must get out of them exactly what flower and what colour. If they say they want a boat, you must find out exactly what kind of boat. And if they say they want a cow, well, better make sure they don't ACTUALLY mean the kind that meows and catches mice.
"They'll also change their mind or demand changes at random times, and at the end will blame you for not guessing they actually wanted something different. You'll also have to change it to that, and repeat about a dozen times.
"Harry will play the Pointy Haired Boss in his exercise. He'll give you extra directives, like only using blue and yellow chalk because of trying to consolidate into fewer technologies, or drawing with the chalk on paper because he read that that's the latest buzzword. For your grade, you'll have to figure out a way to satisfy both him and your customer. If you end up trying to mix
This academic you speak of... is it who I think it is?
Depends on who you think about, I should think. I'm talking about Lawrence Summers.
What about for an academic to suggest that biophysical differences might be in part responsible for statistical disparities?
If he can actually quote scientific disparities, then he should go ahead. If he's just postulating unsupported bullshit then it's just the usual sexism.
I didn't see him quoting any scientific data, just inventing some numbers and massaging them into justifying disparities by nothing more than "what if". Well, that's nice, but he's not proving there more than that he can extract a root, if that's his only support for his conclusion, not that he's actually having an explanation. Just being able to pick an arbitrary Flanagan's finagling factor ("That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have got.") for no more reason or explanation than giving him the final number he wants, does not a scientific biological explanation make.
Doubly damning is that his maths don't work that way for actual differences. If there is a difference in where the gauss curves are centered, and an objective selection is done, then it doesn't matter through how many layers of selection you got there. What DOES work like in his maths, however, is it at each level there is a level of bias against promoting women or offering equal incentives.
That is the same as calling women dumber?
If it's based on unuspported postulates about their lack of intellectual aptitude, yes.
Because, you know, those biophysical differences are well established. Until testosterone and estrogen levels lose their dependency on gender, men and women will continue to have functionally significant differences in the corpus callosum.
If they're actually well known, can you quote any studies that actually show a difference in IQ or aptitude in physics?
Because, you know, cretin apologists pretending they can just throw around "well known" to mask their bullshit preconceptions, is hardly impressing me.
But obviously, in this era of batshit crazy political correctness, who would be so crazy as to suggest that men and women are, you know, different?
But obviously, in this era of batshit-crazy idiots trying to get their privileges back by dressing their prejudice in a thin veil of pseudo-science, it would be too much to expect that such claims of relevant biological differences be actually supported. You know, instead of seeing one more such idiot rails against reality or acting like a decent human being is "batshit crazy political correctness".
For a start, Hurd wiped out almost all R&D. Which is pretty much guaranteed to boost stock in the short run by reducing costs. It also usually signals the spiral into death or becoming an irrelevant a me-too OEM for a tech company.
He also managed to drag the morale into the fucking ground, pretty much. And managed come across as a huge hypocrite by posing as cutting even his own salary in his quest to slash everyone else's... but have his compensation raised by the exact same amount. So, you know, way to say, "fuck you, it only applies to you peons after all." Padding his travel expenses on top of that, just made it all the more petty.
Anyone coming after that would face a stock drop sooner or later even if they did nothing but continue Hurd's line, because that's what's coming after such a policy. Trying to get back into being a tech company, well, that raises the costs right back in the short run and the payoff will be later, so it was pretty much predictable that it will drop the stock price even more.
I would hardly consider such (occasionally destructive) Wall Street metrics to be relevant for an apples-to-apples comparison of two CEOs.
As for Oracle, meh, Larry is a bit of Captain Asshole on a personal crusade to make the world safer for rich assholes everywhere to abuse their power. You can almost picture him swooping away, with his cape flowing in the wind, after saving some prick from those peons who thought to hold him responsible for some sexual harrassment or sexism or such, while starry-eyed crowds go, "Thank you, Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you!" But I doubt even he would blow that many billions just so Hurd can have his petty revenge. Now maybe if it was Larry's personal revenge, or rescuing yet another asshole CEO, he might do it, but I doubt he'll bet the company just to make Mark Hurd's day.
You have to give the man credit though, at least he puts his money where is convictions are. Many will offer lip service to why it should be like in the good old days when it was ok for a CEO to harass subordinates or for an academic to hold public speeches about how women are dumber. (Bonus points if they actually just prove how a little sexism adds up.) But it takes someone like Larry to actually go on public record as trying to financially bully a college into tolerating such a sexist prick, or to actually blow some money to make a point that Hurd should be allowed to be a flaming asshole, dammit. Hats off, not many people would do that.
Well, actually the first article says that it was an annual sales conference, and generally you'd notice everyone even mentioned is a manager or HR consultant or such. E.g., the woman he asked to flutter her eyelashes is apparently a HR consultant, at a quick googling.
What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃgermeister for the peons?
So unless you were some sales manager or such, yeah, probably you wouldn't see that happening at any company you worked for, or even at MS. They're not going to do that for the likes of YOU, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as someone who's been there for a week or so now, I can tell you that you can hardly tell. I haven't run into much nerdiness about anything movie-related. If anything, it comes across more like a bunch of KOTOR fans, plus the occasional (and frankly expected) "OMG IT'S WOW WITH GUNS!!!111eleventeen" trolling.
Actually, I've yet to see anyone who says that logical reasoning flat-out is unimportant. (Except when you apply it to their Bible or Quran, I guess.)
What is the actual objection is that the ways used to measure it, actually measure more whether you trained the application of that exact measuring method, than a more general ability to use logic in the real world or in a real world job. It's, if you will, like I were to measure your mental abilities by your gear-score in WoW. Sure, it can be argued that you need SOME amount of intelligence to know what to get or how to function in a group or even follow directions for what to do at the boss, but at the end of the day, I really just tested how much time you were willing to dump into raiding in WoW.
But otherwise nobody will actually tell you that the ability to do logical reasoning is bad. It's just being measured badly.
As for the Flynn effect, that's the most bogus explanation I've ever heard, no offense. The effect of warfare on the US population since WW2 has been minimal, and even less important in Europe. Starvation is also no longer a major factor. The vast, immense, overwhelming majority of people who would have flunked survival of the fittest in the past, now do pass their genes on just the same. In fact, even the opposite can be better supported: the dumb procreate faster. You can't explain an effect by something that's just NOT THERE. You might as well blame it on Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy (maybe smart kids don't ever sleep with their head under the pillow;)) at that point.
Yeah, I could live with it being just GQ. Even Geek EQ, I suppose. It's just "IQ" that seems horribly misused IMHO.
Not really. Or not outside of the bizarro world of Internet marketing.
Actual IQ tests still at least try to measure certain kinds of mental aptitude. While some degree of knowledge are unfortunately inherent in being able to even ask the questions, much less answer them (e.g., someone has to be familiar with rectangular blocks before you can ask them to count blocks in a picture), that was never the focus of actual IQ tests. How much you know about some obscure subject -- be it Star Trek or Victorian novels -- is just not part of the definition of IQ.
However the notion is increasingly MISUSED to basically mean "whatever way we can play on your insecurities and need to reassure yourself, to get a click out of you". This can mean knowledge of trivial things, or even things completely unrelated to intelligence, like optical illusions, deliberately ambiguous pictures, paraeidolia, or whatever.
When you see stuff like "93% of people can't tell whether the ballerina rotates to the left or right" on some "IQ Test" ad (you know the kind I'm talking about), it doesn't really mean that the definition of IQ or of IQ Tests has changed. It just means that some dishonest marketers are aiming exactly for the kind of idiot who'd (A) not realize it's a stupid scam, and (B) is insecure enough to actually want some website to pat him on the head and tell him that he's so smart after all.
It's not really all that different from preying on some people's sexual insecurities to sell them penis enlargement pills.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that IQ is pretty meaningless for anything except taking an IQ test. But still, it at least means that. Memorizing trivia that's fully useless to anyone and for anything else than a trivia contest, is just not the same thing as high IQ.
Ookaaay... exactly what does knowing obscure trivia about shows from 50 years ago have to do with IQ? I could see it as a geek score for bragging rights, or a hint if you might want to have a professional look into whether you've got Asperger's, but IQ? Seriously?
But therein lies the rub: type of product.
That's how for example aspirin became a generic name for acetylsalicylic acid. It had become a synonym for that kind of an analgesic, to the extent where everyone was just saying stuff like "take two aspirins" when they meant "take some acetylsalicylic acid".
You don't lose a trademark just because a term is generic for something ELSE than your product. Microsoft Windows is still a trademark, although "windows" has been a generic term for, you know, a certain kind of hole in a wall since the 12'th century. (The concept of a window itself is of course older, but the first attestation of the English word "window" -- or close enough -- is from the 12'th century.) Apple Inc doesn't lose its trademark just because the word "apple" has been used for a kind of fruit for over a thousand years. And Prince Albert Tobacco doesn't get to be generic just because Prince Albert also is commonly used for a type of piercing.
What I'm getting at is that even IF it were to came to pass that Washington University became synonymous with some sexual practice or position, and people went around saying stuff like "woohoo, I had a Washington University yesterday with two chicks"... so what? As long as that doesn't apply to a college, it doesn't come even close to threatening the actual Washington University's trademark.
Because really it's not only about sex.
HPV is a whole family of nearly two hundred known viruses, affecting various types of cells. HPV can cause warts or lesions just as well in the mouth, or on the skin, or ass, or really wherever the virus can get. Some types (e.g., 6 and 11) can even cause respiratory infections.
And all infections raise your risk of cancer. To actually get cancer you need at least two well aimed mutations, one that takes the brakes off cell division, and one which activates one of the two mechanisms which regenerate telomeres (maximum division counters) on the affected cells. HPV gives you the first one for free, as part of its viral payload AND deactivates two genes that normally try to kill tumor cells. (Cells dividing out of control also replicate the virus more.) So now you're only one mutation away from cancer, which is more vulnerable than it sounds.
So now if you have a compromised piece of skin, it's that much easier for UV to turn it into melanoma. If you have an infection in the mouth, well, smoking just became much more likely to give you mouth cancer. Etc.
So, really, while cervix cancer gets all the attention, HPV is involved in about 25% of the cancers of the mouth and upper throat for example. And since we're talking about vaccinating boys, actually men are at a higher risk of oral HPV infections than women, for whatever reason. And don't even think "hur hur hur, VD in the mouth, Beavis" as simple open mouth kissing is enough to get it too.
Plus there are enough cases where it's transmitted from an infected mother to the baby, whose immune system is pretty much crap at the time. There is no amount of discouraging teen sex that will make it an ok tradeoff to have babies pre-infected with something that will leave them susceptible to cancer.
Really, while cervix cancer is horrible, the focus on it as if it were the only problem is actually unfortunate, because it lets idiot self-righteous moralists to turn it into just an aspect of their delusional war on sex. In reality even if you managed to discourage sex (and good luck with that), your kid can still get throat cancer if he just made out with an infected girl. (Especially if he also takes up smoking, but non-smokers have enough such cases too.)
Keep trying to discourage sex if that floats your boat, but in the meantime if we can vaccinate against a virus that causes over 5% of all cancers, then we really should do it.
So it seems to me like he has all the reasons to want people locked in his walled garden, not in Microsoft's or Apple's.
While I see your point, that's niche at best. Even most developers are really coding against ONE operating system and really set of libraries, because they're doing server apps. So while making the perfect app that can truly run everywhere might be a nice nerdy goal to have (non-nerds will have more tangible goals like "get laid" or "get paid" or "make it to Friday 5pm so I can spend the weekend at the pub"), in practice they're still getting paid for something that will only have to run on, say, Java 1.6 on an AIX computer on a Power 5 CPU and with exactly the IBM VM that comes with Websphere at that. So, you know, whether it runs exactly the same in Windows 7 or an old copy of XP is really fluff. If it works on the test and production server, then that's that. Need or want for some testing across all possible OS-s? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
And that's not even getting into what end-users do, and let's just say that, yes, it's the apps that are important. It only matters if they can use MS Word to read your doc, or IE to read your site. Even the thought of configuring 5 operating systems to check out your page in 7 different browsers and versions, ranks for the average user up there with being anally raped with a spiked mace. He doesn't want to do that. He just wants to point whichever browser his "Internet" icon launches at your site and do whatever he needs done.
For him even having one OS is more of a nuisance that comes with the territory. Even the thought of trying the same under a different OS ranks up there with trying to walk to work with a different number of feet. Why bother?
So I guess to return to the question in the OP, basically you have Adam Smith's invisible hand flipping you an invisible but humongous middle finger. It's easier and cheaper to let you figure out using VMs and multiple OS's than to make that a standard feature. Because the average John Does ain't paying for it, and ain't wanting any of it.
I dunno, some of us never really got into Mario, though I can't say I ever got too philosophical about why. It could be the moustache ;)
And, again, some of us don't find stupidly oversized weapons to be a turn on. In fact, some of us have donated a bunch of free time to make more realistically sized weapons for some games. E.g., for my part, stuff like the arming swords or Japanese weapons for Oblivion/Fallout 3/New Vegas. Though I'm probably not the best example, check out Adonnay's weapons for several games for some much better quality weapons.
And a bunch of people download such realistically sized weapons.
Don't get me wrong, though, I have occasionally done oversized stuff for lulz too, but still nowhere near such silly extremes as the Buster Sword or the 2 ft broad "Zanbato" in a certain anime. (Never mind that a historical Zanbato was 1.25 inch broad or so.) Think more like a 4 inch broad Zweihaender instead of 2 inch, for what counts as comically oversized for me. And more importantly it's supposed to be mostly a parody, and named and described appropriately to indicate parody intentions, and usually indicating in the description too that it's not historical and why. I don't see anything like that in the JRPG series you mentioned.
But at any rate, no, some of us don't find gigantic swords awesome, and some of us even spent many many hours modelling meshes to make more accurately sized weapons.
So, basically, video games can still turn anti-social ultra-competitive assholes into anti-social ultra-competitive assholes? Blows my mind.
On the other hand, I can see furries being all over this. "No, really, you'll be ok if you wear this glowing cat suit" :p
Meh, how much worse can the Goa'uld be than the existing politicians we got? :p
In a few games, yes, they're cosmetic or offer negligible advantages. E.g., the jet pack in COH is fully equivalent to something you can buy in game from level 1 for 10,000 inf (think about the equivalent of 10,000 copper coins in WoW) and will last you longer, so, yeah, not much of an advantage.
In others it can get even more extreme than my analogies.
E.g., I remember a web game based on Battletech where
A) fights were at best limited by tonnage, not by points, and you could even spend on blowing that limit in an invasion,
and
B) with enough RL cash you could actually do crap like bring Level 2 or even Level 3 mechs against the Level 1 mechs everyone else was limited to. And if you're not a guru at Battletech, by "level", I mean basically sorta generation, with each being vastly superior per ton to the previous. At the same tonnage, a L3 will curb-stomp any L1. In the board game they're limited by also being worth more points, but, see above, in this game that was removed.
So, yes, for all practical purposes, you could pay to have the equivalent of a spiked steel gauntlet in a boxing match. In fact, you could even splurge a little extra and pay to have a couple more guys with you punching the opponent. It's not just a loaded analogy, you could literally pay to be as disproportionately more powerful as you wanted, if you had enough disposable cash. Rumour had it that the top guy in that game had blown 20,000$ on being the untouchable superpower he was.
It's not even the only game like that.
E.g., in Runes Of Magic, by buying skill books and leaving your character parked at home to study them over night, you can have vastly more skill points than an equal level character who didn't do that. In WoW terms, think having twice the number of talent points of someone who didn't pay. Yep, the equivalent of that was possible.
And it's a shame, really, because ROM was one of the first MMOs which nailed a good enough substitute for WoW. Long before Rift. If it hadn't been for the blatant RL money aspect of ROM, or if they had made a server where it's all free of that crap and rebalanced to work without dumping hundreds of dollars into making your raiding character epic, I wouldn't have minded giving them $15 a month. Heck, even 20 or 30. I'm not opposed to paying for good quality and casual-gamer-friendly gameplay.
But probably they're making more from fleecing their smaller player base than that, so, oh well...
Reducing any moral problem to just whether making money is right or wrong, is, sad to say, bullshit. In fact if that's the only thing that you see relevant in such a discussion, congrats, you might be a sociopath. You may have a successful career in upper management ahead of you.
While nobody says that making money itself is immoral, certain ways of making them ARE. E.g., if you found out that your mayor or the local judge makes some extra money by taking bribes, well, I don't know about you personally, but most people would file that under "immoral."
But generally we have a long tradition of frowning against basically offering to bend the rules in exchange for money. Whether it's in politics or sports or whatever.
If the Superbowl involved officially letting teams pay for the privilege of punching opposite team members, or to get an extra kick at the opposing goal, most people probably wouldn't bother even watching just to see which team spent more money on unfair advantages. Most would also consider it fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sportsmanship or competition.
Ditto if, dunno, the boxing championships started auctioning the right to have a horseshoe in the glove, or if baseball championships started auctioning the right to use a tennis racquet instead of a bat, or if the Olympics started being ok with steroids as long as you buy them from the organizers. At some point any semblance of "may the best sportsman win" becomes "may the guy with the most disposable cash win", and it becomes just a meaningless competition to be the most financially irresponsible loser.
You'll notice that the above are direct equivalents of most micro-transaction schemes in most games. What once at least had some semblance of reflecting relative skill or effort or even just time invested, is becoming a competition in who's insecure enough to blow $1000 on overpowered equipment to finally feel secure to curb-stomp a newbie half his level. And there is no fundamental difference between paying to be allowed to use racquets instead of bats in baseball, vs paying for the Legendary Sword Of Newbie Slaying +9 to use in PvP, or vs blowing some money on whatever else to top some PvE charts either.
So, no, not many of us will frown at making money, but at the way you make them. And if more and more competitions and achievements become rigged to milk money from whoever wants to pay for unfair advantages, don't be surprised if most people don't exactly take that as a positive development.
In other news, after the accusations of using Top Gun footage to demonstrate the supposed Chinese super-plane, the Xinhua News Agency is rumoured to be already working on excuses for why their submarine newscasts look suspiciously like something from The Hunt For Red October. Several party spokespersons are rumored to be practicing in advance saying "No, it's not like that, captain Wang Hung Lo just happens to look exactly like Sean Connery" with a straight face ;)
I dunno... I definitely didn't start in college with programming. In fact, I was already good in several programming languages, including Z80 assembly by the time the muppets in college even tried to teach us the first thing about computers.
But on the whole I still say that I used to find it a lot more fun before it actually became a job. Sure, I could still do it for fun at home, and actually still do, but... somehow it's not the same thing any more. Too often after dealing with yet another moron whose clever optimization is to use Integer instead of int, because, I kid you not, "then the runtime only copies a pointer to it on the stack, not the whole int", or another moron customer who thinks 90% of the work is done after he saw a HTML mockup (after all, that is the hard part, right?), or some moron whose idea of managing or testing is to count pixels with a magnifying glass and woe if a label is rendered differently in his browser than in the Paintshop images in the requirements, or some moron whose idea of performance testing is to time the unit tests and call a meeting if this week it runs slower than the last week (e.g., because extra tests for fixed bugs got included), etc... too often I just want to forget that programming even exists.
My personal advice to any kid who loves programming would be: find a different job to pay the bills, and keep doing programming just for your own fun. That way you'll both keep your fun hobby untainted by such crap, and probably have higher job satisfaction in that job that pays the bills too. And while it may seem like an eternity until you'll be a boring 40-year-old or even 30, trust me, it'll be sooner than you think that you find yourself on the shit end of a bigger age-ism stick than porn actresses do.
Eh, it didn't take that long. It kinda just came naturally as I was typing it, which probably is the saddest part.
That said, as I was saying, I'm answering about software development, not about programming. I still think it captures the actual and more important essence of software development: taking something that at first sounds like great fun and something you like to do (which drawing flowers with chalk is a good guess for little children) and mis-managing it into a soul-sucking nightmare. Using some fun building stuff with blocs as an illustration may be a better example of the programming part, but sadly it would miss the more important soul-sucking parts there.
Actually, some of us are pretty easy about it. Although the Christian God is contradictory enough to be impossible to fully demonstrate, I for one would settle for a much less powerful being as God. Or as a god.
And it's not just me. For 99% of the existence of the human species, we lived just fine with much less omnipotent gods. Even the Jewish God of the OT, actually promised a lot less. Heck, until very late, he didn't even promise an afterlife at all. (In fact, Genesis even spells it out that God _didn't_ want humans to have eternal life.) Other civilizations were perfectly OK with Gods of limited powers, or not immortal (see the Norse Gods), or even already dead (see Osiris.)
I mean, take the traditional supposed powers of a Pharaoh, as an incarnate of Horus. He was supposed to bring fertility and prosperity by just being there, bring Ma'at (justice, orders, etc) to the land, etc. And of course, be the representative of some guys who can give an afterlife.
Let's say some dude came forward and claimed that he is the new incarnate of Horus. How would we go about testing it? Well, for example, let's see if he can influence the fertility of some plots of land, in a double-blind experiment. He gets 100 randomly selected farms he has to boost the production of, 100 he must lower the production of, and 100 more are chosen as control. Repeat that for 2-3 years.
Nobody else knows which farms, until it's time to compare results.
Ma'at? Same deal. Get a list of 100 random cities where the criminality must drop faster than the nation average. Can he pull that stunt?
If he wants to go for even more god points, let's see, Rameses II at Kadesh claimed to have been at some point deserted by all his soldiers and that he personally, with his divine dad Ra as help, repelled the assault of the Hittite chariots at the crucial point of that battle. So it seems to me like there is precedent that the incarnate Horus could use his superhuman powers in battle. Well, we can test that too. We set the guy against a few remote controlled drones or vehicles with belt-fed beanbag ammo, and he must destroy some of them without getting beaned.
If someone can do that, personally I'll cheerfully proclaim him a god. Maybe not THE God, and I may have my doubts about whether it's actually supernatural (as opposed to, you know, it being natural that someone is a god like that;)) but I'll cheerfully grant that guy a minor god status. I might even volunteer to pull rocks for his pyramid, because, hey, it can't hurt to get on a god's good side.
Yep, that's the trick part, way I see it. He asked about software development, not programming. Programming what you want, especially in a game, is fun. Software development, on the other hand has lower average job satisfaction than being a garbage man, according to a survey from a couple of years ago.
Mind you, it might still be able to explain it via an exercise, but I don't think anyone has the heart to do that to some innocent little kids. I mean, it would probably go like this:
"Hi, kids, my name is Moraelin and I'm here to show you how software development goes. I must thank Mrs Crabapple for letting us come to the park for this exercise. We'll be making this a role-playing exercise, so it's easy to understand. I brought a few friends to help with some key roles. Say hi to Tom, Dick, Harry, Jack and Jill.
"Now the first thing to remember is that we're not in this for the fun. You'll get a grade for this, so try to do your best.
"The most important skill in my profession is to sit in meetings and look interested. It may not be the greatest percentage of the day, unless you really draw the short straw, but you'd be surprised how much more important making a good impression to the boss is than actual work...
"You over there? Yes, you in the blue sweater. What's your name? Well, Billy, you get a minus one point on the grade for fidgeting instead of paying attention. Yes, I know it's boring, but that's the whole point I'm trying to convey. Let this be your first lesson in real world employment.
"Well, anyway, for the purpose of this exercise, you'll be divided into teams and have to draw something on the pavement with chalk. As a team. Remember, what matters is the whole result, not just your own personal performance.
"Now to make things more educational, I brought a second class to pad the teams with. The assignments will be big enough to include them, but they've all been assigned some secret roles to play. Most... let's just say it sounds like 'mazy loron', but occasionally you'll get the guy who just tells you how to do your job instead of his own doing his, the guy who keeps adding pointless "THIS IS A FLOWER" comments to your work instead of doing his own part, the guy who keeps trying to tell you about his vacation instead of letting you work, and so on. Some may even be naturally inclined to go beyond even the assigned role in their being useless and counter-productive.
"I probably don't need to tell you that you're not supposed to beat them up even if they 'accidentally' erase your part of the work. In fact, you're not even allowed to complain about them. Doing so will get you a bad grade for being a bad team member.
"You have a question? Oh, WHAT you'll have to draw? I don't know myself either. Tom and Dick will role-play the customer. You'll have to make them tell you what they want drawn.
"Now they'll be as vague and occasionally wrong as humanly possible, and occasionally obnoxious, but you must extract exact information from them. You don't get points by just doing close enough. If they say they want a flower, you must get out of them exactly what flower and what colour. If they say they want a boat, you must find out exactly what kind of boat. And if they say they want a cow, well, better make sure they don't ACTUALLY mean the kind that meows and catches mice.
"They'll also change their mind or demand changes at random times, and at the end will blame you for not guessing they actually wanted something different. You'll also have to change it to that, and repeat about a dozen times.
"Harry will play the Pointy Haired Boss in his exercise. He'll give you extra directives, like only using blue and yellow chalk because of trying to consolidate into fewer technologies, or drawing with the chalk on paper because he read that that's the latest buzzword. For your grade, you'll have to figure out a way to satisfy both him and your customer. If you end up trying to mix
Yeah, but you know what's the difference? :p
If the prostitute's boss or client is riding her ass, chances are he'll finish in a couple of minutes
Depends on who you think about, I should think. I'm talking about Lawrence Summers.
If he can actually quote scientific disparities, then he should go ahead. If he's just postulating unsupported bullshit then it's just the usual sexism.
I didn't see him quoting any scientific data, just inventing some numbers and massaging them into justifying disparities by nothing more than "what if". Well, that's nice, but he's not proving there more than that he can extract a root, if that's his only support for his conclusion, not that he's actually having an explanation. Just being able to pick an arbitrary Flanagan's finagling factor ("That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have got.") for no more reason or explanation than giving him the final number he wants, does not a scientific biological explanation make.
Doubly damning is that his maths don't work that way for actual differences. If there is a difference in where the gauss curves are centered, and an objective selection is done, then it doesn't matter through how many layers of selection you got there. What DOES work like in his maths, however, is it at each level there is a level of bias against promoting women or offering equal incentives.
If it's based on unuspported postulates about their lack of intellectual aptitude, yes.
If they're actually well known, can you quote any studies that actually show a difference in IQ or aptitude in physics?
Because, you know, cretin apologists pretending they can just throw around "well known" to mask their bullshit preconceptions, is hardly impressing me.
But obviously, in this era of batshit-crazy idiots trying to get their privileges back by dressing their prejudice in a thin veil of pseudo-science, it would be too much to expect that such claims of relevant biological differences be actually supported. You know, instead of seeing one more such idiot rails against reality or acting like a decent human being is "batshit crazy political correctness".
I wish it was that clear.
For a start, Hurd wiped out almost all R&D. Which is pretty much guaranteed to boost stock in the short run by reducing costs. It also usually signals the spiral into death or becoming an irrelevant a me-too OEM for a tech company.
He also managed to drag the morale into the fucking ground, pretty much. And managed come across as a huge hypocrite by posing as cutting even his own salary in his quest to slash everyone else's... but have his compensation raised by the exact same amount. So, you know, way to say, "fuck you, it only applies to you peons after all." Padding his travel expenses on top of that, just made it all the more petty.
Anyone coming after that would face a stock drop sooner or later even if they did nothing but continue Hurd's line, because that's what's coming after such a policy. Trying to get back into being a tech company, well, that raises the costs right back in the short run and the payoff will be later, so it was pretty much predictable that it will drop the stock price even more.
I would hardly consider such (occasionally destructive) Wall Street metrics to be relevant for an apples-to-apples comparison of two CEOs.
As for Oracle, meh, Larry is a bit of Captain Asshole on a personal crusade to make the world safer for rich assholes everywhere to abuse their power. You can almost picture him swooping away, with his cape flowing in the wind, after saving some prick from those peons who thought to hold him responsible for some sexual harrassment or sexism or such, while starry-eyed crowds go, "Thank you, Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you!" But I doubt even he would blow that many billions just so Hurd can have his petty revenge. Now maybe if it was Larry's personal revenge, or rescuing yet another asshole CEO, he might do it, but I doubt he'll bet the company just to make Mark Hurd's day.
You have to give the man credit though, at least he puts his money where is convictions are. Many will offer lip service to why it should be like in the good old days when it was ok for a CEO to harass subordinates or for an academic to hold public speeches about how women are dumber. (Bonus points if they actually just prove how a little sexism adds up.) But it takes someone like Larry to actually go on public record as trying to financially bully a college into tolerating such a sexist prick, or to actually blow some money to make a point that Hurd should be allowed to be a flaming asshole, dammit. Hats off, not many people would do that.
âoeThe measure of a man is what he does with power.â -- Plato
(And to keep with times, I'd say it goes for women too.)
Well, actually the first article says that it was an annual sales conference, and generally you'd notice everyone even mentioned is a manager or HR consultant or such. E.g., the woman he asked to flutter her eyelashes is apparently a HR consultant, at a quick googling.
What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃgermeister for the peons?
So unless you were some sales manager or such, yeah, probably you wouldn't see that happening at any company you worked for, or even at MS. They're not going to do that for the likes of YOU, of course.